Content for teachers and students about robotics in our world. Is robotics the Perfect Platform for 21st Century Learning? Read on!.. Would you like your student robotics activities presented here? Leave a comment or email me. And check out Robotics for Teachers PODCAST @ http://www.roboticsforteachers.com/

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Providing home-schooled kids with rich, engaging, and relevant STEM activities
is a challenge. With LEGO Robotics, though, home-schooled students can be
deeply involved in real-world applications of Science, Math, Engineering, and
Technology - Computer programming becomes a fun and enlightening game, as well. All of this is accomplished in a practical manner. Robotics represents the best sort of hands-on/minds-on, 21st
Century Learning. For the modest cost of a LEGO Robotics kit, several students
can be given wonderful, STEM Learning rich experiences.

Robotics for Kids: Great video from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Education

"...They do need good solid Math and Science backgrounds... so, of course, encourage them to do their Math and Science..."

Nothing will encourage students to learn Math and Science better than offering them motivating, relevant ways to apply them. From both the kids' and the educators' points of view, robotics is the perfect application!
"... Starting as early as 3rd grade you can buy a robotics kit for your child to use at home..."

"...it actually develops the skills they would use in a robotics or engineering career."

LEGO Robotics is perfect for Home Schooling kids - It ensures they acquire a sophisticated understanding of STEM subject matter!
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Everything you need to know about working with, or simply supporting, kids in learning with Robotics. No Science or Engineering background needed!

Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

"A Night Watchman With Wheels?""The night watchman of the future is five feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and looks a lot like R2D2 — without the whimsy. And will work for $6.25 an hour.

A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.

“We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook,” said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “You are never going to have an armed officer in every school.”

But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian, post-privacy world.

“This is like R2D2’s evil twin,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington..."

Saturday, November 30, 2013

A great many folks out there still seem to think of robots as things of 'The Future.' Or perhaps, their understanding is that robots are actually here right now, but to be found in exotic locations like automobile manufacturing plants, NASA facilities, and the like. Guess again! Not only are robots close to home currently, but they are so much in evidence that one not only is confronted with the choice of whether or not to acquire one, but which one to buy. In fact, some serious comparison shopping for robots will be a part of our lives soon.

Below are some promotional videos for household window and mirror cleaning robots. Which one would you buy for your home? Why choose that one?

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Here's a most interesting video and article about a new game, presented here as appropriate for young children (although it could be used by just about anyone).

In the very beginning of the use of computers in the classroom people reflexively thought that what kids should do would be to build their own computers and/or learn to program computers. When folks like myself came on the scene a few years later, we argued hard that this was a foolish approach, wasteful of the true potential for computing in Education, which would be to support thinking, research, communicating, etc. We reasoned that, if by analogy, the point of motor vehicles in Education was to get students from point A to point B (to school, to the museum, to the library, etc.) why would students benefit from understanding how a car or bus works? how to repair and maintain them? design them? (other, of course, than for that very small group of students who would actually go into the Automotive Industry)... Part of our aversion to this approach was due to the very obvious, heavy investment in time, effort, and resources needed for students to learn to build, repair, and program computers. As of late, though, a number of items have emerged that make learning to program practical and easy to learn... the LEGO Robotics systems - NXT and WeDo, chief among them... but there are others that continue to emerge. The Robot Turtles Game is an approach that seems practical and worthwhile.By the way, why should kids learn to program? That's a long discussion, but clearly programming is all about thinking clearly, problem solving, and communication... in the extreme! Aren't those things that schools should foster? If you can add a large dosage of FUN to the equation, it's win/win!

"Robot Turtles Is A Board Game Designed By A Googler To Teach Kids Core Coding Principles"

"There are plenty of online resources aimed at teaching kids coding but here's an offline take that uses old school gamification to get kids engaged and learning programming principles while they're having some good old-fashioned family fun (as board game makers used to put it, in the 1980s). Robot Turtles is a board game designed by entrepreneur and CEO of Google Comparison Dan Shapiro - currently on leave from the day job so he can work on cool projects like this.The board game is designed to teach basic programming principles via a series of instruction cards which move the players' pieces (turtles) around the board. The basic object of the game is for players to navigate a maze and capture jewels but the gameplay is sneakily teaching them core coding fundamentals, such as using limited syntax to express complex ideas, getting a grasp on order of operations, and learning debugging by being able to undo instructions when they make mistakes. In other words: essential coding skills.The game also builds in more sophisticated gameplay layers by letting kids graduate from playing one instruction card at a time..."Read the full article at its source:http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/robot-turtles/

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

"In late 2012, Vikas Gupta left his job as head of the consumer payments division at Google and set out to discover what he would do with the rest of his life. He'd recently had a daughter, and he knew his next venture would involve helping kids. Then he chanced across an article about Estonia, and how that country begins teaching programming to all children in first grade. He did a little research into the state of computer science education in America and was shocked to find how rare it was. So he set out to create a compelling way for children as young as four or five to start learning basic coding concepts.

The result was Play-i, a new startup building robots that it hopes will teach children about programming through play. The company is launching a crowdfunding campaign today to raise $250,000 for its first two models. "Thinking back on my own life, I began learning computer science at 14. I couldn’t imagine absorbing those programming concepts, at least the way I was taught them, at an early age," says Gupta, who serves as Play-i's CEO. "But research from MIT and Tufts showed pre-schoolers can grasp programming concepts, most just don’t have the right tools or framework provided to them."

The team at Play-i decided to avoid abstract concepts and the traditional focus on written code and syntax that are the core elements of most common programming languages today. "A lot of coding is about putting things in a sequence," says Gupta. "Ask a four- or five-year-old kid to write out a sequence, and they have trouble organizing a long string of commands. But if you reframe that as a song with lyrics, or a story with a narrative, children that age can create and remember long, complex sequences."

Kids interact with Play-i's robots, Yana and Bo, by giving them instructions. This can be through a tablet or smartphone, where they can drag and drop a sequence of commands. "As they do this, we can begin to introduce some other basic elements of coding, like the concept of loops, or an 'if this than that' instruction," says Gupta. Bo, which can play music on a xylophone, also responds to physical commands. "You can move him, and he will remember that motion, store it as a command, and allow you to play it back or insert it into a sequence."

Gupta assembled a team of hardware experts to help him build Play-i's robots. Co-founder Saurabh Gupta, no relation, is a former engineering manager at Apple who helped design and build 10 generations of iPods. And co-founder Mikal Greaves is a former of employee of Frog Design, where he led the engineering team on projects for Motorola, Disney, and Ford. "We're all programmers and engineers passionate about technology, but above all, we're parents," says Gupta. "We knew the biggest engineering challenge was keeping the robots affordable."

Sunday, October 6, 2013

We often think about robots as being cold and unemotional. But robots have great potential as a platform from which their human creators and masters can express feelings and ideas. A few visionaries have realized this, Disney's theme park amusements and movie makers, are some of the better examples. Education is an area in which this largely unexplored potential can see great advantages. There are 2 fronts on which this is likely true: 1) robots as teachers or teaching devices, and 2) making robotic resources available to students (along with instruction in how to use them) and challenging them to produce robotic creations that express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in an affective way. See the article and videos below...

"The Cornish robotic actor coming to a theatre near you: £55,000 Robo-thespian delights and offends audiences

- RoboThespian has in-built cameras, depth perception and facial recognition- It can adapt its script to the audience during stage shows and guided tours- Several RoboThespians, however, have been attacked for causing offenceThey may look more like Wall-E than the raging humanoid robots in 'I, Robot', but these thespian actors are certainly causing a stir. RoboThespian is the creation of Cornish engineer Will Jackson who had an idea to develop an artistic robot that could react with its audiences. Six years ago he embarked on a project to create a robot that would save tour guides from tediously repeating the same script each day. Today, around 35 RoboThespians are delighting theatre-goers and tourists throughout the world.They are also trained to recognise gestures such as waving goodbye and are able to copy body poses. They are multi-lingual and can even sing. But not everyone is pleased with the humanoid robots. Jackson toldHumans Invent how one RoboThespian was punched by someone in Germany..."

...The company claims that increasingly academic research groups and universities are using the robots in their research and development platforms......A restaurant in Seoul, where robots cook all the food and robots take your order, is also using RoboThespians as part of its operations. Meanwhile, three RoboThespians recently reached new artistic heights by appearing in a live stage show, the Legend of Robotland: Tria’s Star, featuring a completely robotic cast..."

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Science Fiction Theater was a late 1950's TV show. Here's an episode titled "Time Is Just A Place" that features a house cleaning robot, a miniature X-Ray machine, and other innovative devices from what seemed to be a fantastic, distant future when it aired. Take a look! You'll find the retro TV show production style entertaining. You'll also find it informative about the emergence of technology and our attitudes about it.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

A graduate student wearing a skull cap covered in wires sits perfectly still and thinks about making a fist with his right hand. Nearby, a small quadcopter - a flying drone with four rotors - turns right. He imagines making a fist with his left hand and the robotic flying copter goes left. After a thought about clenching both hands, it lifts higher into the air.

He is controlling the device with his mind.

The system is part of a new research project that reads the brain's electrical activity and translates certain thoughts into commands for the unmanned aerial vehicle. It's called a brain-computer interface, and someday it could have important uses for people who are paralyzed.
"We envision that they’ll use this technology to control wheelchairs, artificial limbs or other devices," said University of Minnesota engineering professor Bin He in a post announcing the project.

Here's how it works: Imagining specific movements without actually doing them produces electric currents in the motor cortex. The interface itself isn't new, but the researchers used brain imaging scans to find out exactly which imagined movements activated which neurons.

Once they mapped out the various thoughts and associated signals, they used them to control a helicopter simulation on a computer. Next, they moved on to real flying devices.

There are no implants or invasive brain tweaks needed for subject to control the copter with their brain. The technology is called electroencephalography (EEG). The skull cap uses 64 electrodes to detect these currents from a subject's brain as they think about associated actions, then translates that data into instructions and transmits them to the quadcopter over Wi-Fi.

In the test, pilots weren't allowed to look at the quadcopter while they controlled it, only a screen showing the view from a small camera mounted on the front of the flying vehicle. After a few hours of training, the subjects could move the quadcopters with precision, even guiding them through hoops suspended from the ceiling.

Student Focus Question(s): What other types of robots would this sort of control be particularly good for? Do you see any problems with this way of controlling robots? What do you think would happen if 2 people who could control robots this way had a disagreement about what to make the robot do? After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Monday, July 8, 2013

What do you really need a robot for MOST at a barbeque? It could be for cooking, but maybe cleaning that grill is even better!

"These chillin’ and grillin’ robots make July 4 BBQs more awesome
Fourth of July barbecues are an American tradition that kick off the summer grilling season. Few things are sweeter than relaxing in the sunshine with a cold beer, surrounded by family, friends, and the aroma of roasting meat. But balancing the demands of cooking meat over flame with the desire to relax with loved ones can wear some down.
Fortunately in this day and age, technology can solve these problems. Robots, drones, and mobile machines are here to put your mind and body at easy this Fourth of July. God Bless America. And robots.

The Hamburglar

The perfect hamburger requires careful execution of many of components. There is the composition of the ground meat to consider, and then pressure to achieve the right char-to-juice ratio, not to mention the laborious process of slicing up tomatoes and other toppings.Momentum Machines has created a hamburger-making robot that automates the entire process of cooking a hamburger. It can produce around 360 hamburgers an hour, complete with tomatoes, pickles, condiments, or whatever your stomach desires.
The machine is intended to replace the line cooks at hamburger restaurants, providing a more efficient, sanitary, and cost-effective alternative. However, I don’t see any reason why a burger enthusiast with a wide-and-hungry social circle couldn’t benefit from the product as well. Between Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and global warming, there are plenty of sunny, barbecue-friendly days ahead.

Hot doggin’

If you are more of a hot dog person, don’t despair. Students across North America are building automatic hot dog machines. I found two examples — one from the Rochester Institute of Technology and the other from Humber College in Toronto — of machines that assemble hot dogs for you.
These machines cook the sausages and deliver them gracefully into the soft embrace of the hot dog buns. Once safely ensconced between the fluffy white bread, it guides the hot dogs down the line to the ketchup and mustard station, where they receives a delicate coating of condiments before exiting the machine into your waiting hands.
No more rotating the links on the grill, no more setting up an assembling of sandwiches, no more ketchup and mustard stains on your clothing (unless you are a messy eater).

Student Focus Question(s): What other barbecue chores would a robot be handy for? How might they work? After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

It sounds rather grandiose, but the humanoid robot has made a real difference in the life of Evans, who suffered a brain stem stroke at age 40 that left him paralyzed and mute. Therapy has enabled him to move his head and a finger.

That allows him to use a computer and control PR2. The bot helped him scratch an itch for the first time in 10 years.

As the vid below shows, Evans prefers to shave himself with PR2 rather than have others do it.

The robot has a Kinect motion-tracking system that can monitor his head movements, and Evans can use it for navigation and to manipulate objects.

Student Focus Question(s): What do you think is the type of help that most disabled people would accept from robots? Why? Do you see any danger for people in relying on robots this way?

After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Thursday, June 27, 2013

I’m just back from the wonderful ISTE annual conference in San Antonio where I experienced blissful information/inspiration overload for the past few days (BTW... ISTE = International Society for Technology in Education ).

I was thrilled to see that throughout the conference student robotics were present and attracting attention from the many, many thousands of educators in attendance! I didn’t get to see all of the robotics products, demonstrations, workshops, and poster sessions based on the student robotics theme, but I did see quite a few. Below are the things that caught my interest and admiration. I’ll be revisiting these in the weeks to come and hope my investigations prove informative and useful to the readers of this blog. The big takeaway for me from ISTE 2013 is that student robotics is growing and diversifying, which means that soon it will assume more of its rightful rock-star place among the pantheon of favored instructional approaches and practices in our schools. Hey, the kids deserve it and we owe it to them. If we expect to be able to look them in the eye down the road as we mutually think back and reflect over what sort of education we provided them, then we really must include robotics…

Thanks very much to Ms. Jenni Breeze of LEGO Education who gave me a one-on-one explanation and demo. EV3 is clearly a next level improvement over the current NXT materials. And considering that after a year or two, EV3 is what will be available, we really should get ourselves up to speed on it as soon as is practical. The kits aren’t available yet (as I understand it) but will be soon.

K*NEX (Computer Control) Kits; http://www.knex.com Their booth had a very nice display of machines that students can build with these materials. These are tethered to a computer so that they can be programmed and controlled. They appear to be great STEM resources. While lurking about their booth I heard the rumor that they will be releasing a new and improved generation of these materials soon that will not require direct connection to the computer to operate. In other words, they’ll be autonomous robots. I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Barobo Mobot
http://www.barobo.com/products/mobot/ Here’s a very novel approach to robots that kids build; Barobo, which is a modular system for creating bots. The idea is for kids to put the modules together in a variety of configurations to create the robots they imagine. These are programmable, but with a high degree of independence from a computer. It’s great to see something truly different. I’ll be investigating this very promising resource more down the road.

VEX’s new IQ robotics materials http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/
- VEX caught my attention a few years back with its robotics materials, which are on a bigger, stronger, and more expensive in scale than the LEGO materials. I got a quick look at their new IQ materials at the conference though, which struck me as being of the same sort of scale as LEGO’s Mindstorms/NXT materials, that are so popular in American middle schools. VEX IQ seems to me to be very good, versatile materials that will appeal to teachers and students. I’ll be investigating these, too, over the next few months.

Friday, June 21, 2013

"Robots Could Be Future Playmates for Kids
As technology continues to improve, humanlike robots will likely play an ever-increasing role in our lives: They may become tutors for children, caretakers for the elderly, office receptionists or even housemaids. Children will come of age with these androids, which naturally raises the question: What kind of relationships will kids build with personified robots?

Children will view humanoid robots as intelligent social and moral beings, allowing them to develop substantial and meaningful relationships with the machines, new research suggests.

Researchers analyzed the interactions between nearly 100 children and Robovie, a 3-foot-tall (0.9 meters) robot developed by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan. In the study, two technicians controlled Robovie remotely from another room, leading the children to believe that the robot was autonomous. The researchers imparted humanlike behavior to the robot, such as having Robovie claim unfair treatment when he was told to go into the closet at the end of the interaction sessions.

Follow-up interviews with the children showed that the kids believed Robovie had mental states, such as being intelligent and having feelings, and was a social entity capable of being a friend and confidante. Many of the children also believed that Robovie deserved fair treatment and should not be psychologically harmed. [10 Things That Make Humans Special]

"We typically think [of] robots as rational calculators rather than humanlike and emotional," said Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, who was not involved in the study. "But this research provides a nice example of how endowing a robot with emotions can lead children to treat the robot as a companion and to consider its moral standing."

Student Focus Question(s): Do you think that you could consider a robot a friend? Even if a robot wouldn't be your first choice, could one be your friend in extreme circumstances? (what if you were marooned on a deserted space station? What if you were sick and in a hospital isolation ward?) How might a robot be a better friend than a human? How do you feel robots would make far worse friends than real people?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Saturday, June 8, 2013

ON a recent family outing, my mother and sister got into a shouting match. But they weren’t mad at each other — they were yelling at the iPhone’s turn-by-turn navigation system. I interrupted to say that the phone didn’t understand — or care — that they were upset.

“Honey, we know,” my mom replied. “But it should!” She had a point. After all, computers and technology are becoming only smarter, faster and more intuitive. Artificial intelligence is creeping into our lives at a steady pace. Devices and apps can anticipate what we need, sometimes even before we realize it ourselves. So why shouldn’t they understand our feelings? If emotional reactions were measured, they could be valuable data points for better design and development. Emotional artificial intelligence, also called affective computing, may be on its way.

But should it be? After all, we’re already struggling to cope with the always-on nature of the devices in our lives. Yes, those gadgets would be more efficient if they could respond when we are frustrated, bored or too busy to be interrupted, yet they would also be intrusive in ways we can’t even fathom today. It sounds like a science-fiction movie, and in some ways it is. Much of this technology is still in its early stages, but it’s inching closer to reality.

Companies like Affectiva, a start-up spun out of the M.I.T. Media Lab, are working on software that trains computers to recognize human emotions based on their facial expressions and physiological responses. A company called Beyond Verbal, which has just raised close to $3 million in venture financing, is working on a software tool that can analyze speech and, based on the tone of a person’s voice, determine whether it indicates qualities like arrogance or annoyance, or both..."

Student Focus Question(s): Do you think that robots should recognize human emotions?All robots or just some of them? Which types of robots do you feel would be better if they could recognize emotions? Which emotions would be most useful? If a robot couild recognize and react to human emotions, would that make it more like a real person or would it simply be a machine that worked better to serve humans?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Maybe you’ve dreamt of being that man or woman who is so important as to compose speeches and letters simply by barking out declamations whilst an attentive assistant jots down your brilliant every word. Robot developer Franck Calzada has brought us one step closer. He’s created an assistant scribe for the common man in his new program in which a NAO robot can write any word.

At the moment, however, you’re going to need a lot of time – and patience – if you enlist NAO’s services. To say it’s deliberate in its writing is quite the understatement.

Calzada has himself spent a lot of time with NAO, teaching it to play games like catch, Hangman and the Statue Game. Now, with his ability to write any word it hears, NAO can actually get some work done. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Nao write. And while it will definitely be some time before it begins replacing office workers, its penmanship has certainly improved..."

Student Focus Question(s): Why is this story newsworthy? What do you feel needs to be improved about this robot? Why? If the programers and engineers were able to make the improvements that you'd like to see in this robot, would you use it as a personal secretary? Do you think that some day there will be good robot writing secretaries? Do you think teachers will let students use these robots to take their notes?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Sunday, May 26, 2013

...HAWAII — Twenty-two feet below the surface, the robot glider towed me slowly through clear Hawaiian seas. The day before, a similar glider named Benjamin had arrived in these same waters. Benjamin and three companion gliders had traveled all the way from San Francisco — more than 3,000 miles — powered by only the motion of ocean waves.

Before they left California, Liquid Robotics VP of Operations Graham Hine blessed the gliders by smashing a bottle of champagne on one of their frames, asking nature for assistance: “Neptune, god of the seas, and Aeolus, god of the winds, we ask for your blessings upon these vessels that are going to transit from here to parts formerly unexplored by this kind of robot.”

The gliders had endured an epic journey from California to Hawaii, but they were on a mere layover — they’re in the middle of an attempt to cross the entire Pacific. There’s a world record for “greatest distance by an autonomous wave-powered vehicle” at stake, and on Monday four of the gliders left Hawaii to resume their quest to cross the world’s largest body of water on mostly wave power. The next leg of their trip will take them some 5,000 more nautical miles to the coasts of Australia and Japan.

The Wave Gliders’ journey is more than just a title grab for a machine that was first created as a modest tool to track whale songs. And the journey is more than just an endurance test for the machines, which are capable swimmers...."

Student Focus Question(s): Do you think there may be any limits to the power source these robots use? Are there things that might stop these robots from completing their journey's? If so, what might you design to prevent those things from happening? What most impresses you about this robotics project?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Commnets" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Thursday, May 23, 2013

After a long wait, fans (at least those not lucky enough to catch the sneak peaks offered at San Diego Comic-Con International or New York Comic Con) are finally getting their first look at footage from director Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming flick Pacific Rim. And it was worth the wait — monsters-versus-robots battles at sea, large swaths of city-wide destruction, inspirational speeches from star Charlie Hunnam. It’s all here...

“We always thought alien life would come from the stars, but it came from deep beneath the sea — a portal between dimensions in the Pacific Ocean,” Hunnam says, setting up the trailer. “Something out there had discovered us, but it counted the humans to hide, to give up, to fail. They never considered our ability to stand, to endure; that we would rise to the challenge.”

The general gist of Pacific Rim is that giant creatures have come up out of the sea and threatened to destroy all of humanity. To fight them off the human race has built two-piloted robots known as Jaegers – essentially the F-14s of monster warfare, complete with Top Gun pilots. But as the war between the two sides wages on for years even the massive ‘bots are proving no match for the kaiju onslaught. Close to defeat, a former pilot played by Sons of Anarchy‘s Hunnam and a newbie trainee (Rinko Kikuchi) team up to fight off the apocalypse. Or “canceling the apocalypse” in the words of Idris Elba‘s Stacker Pentecost..."

Student Focus Question(s): Do you think building fighting robots would really be a good way to deal with the problem of Kaiju? Why or Why not? What other ways might humans battle these giant monsters? What other sorts of "monsters" have people created robots to fight?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

"A student with muscular dystrophy could not open his own school locker, so two robotics students stepped up to build an automated opener to give him a hand.

Pinckney Community High School in Pinckney, Mich., is the site of a robotics experiment gone very, very right. Junior Nick Torrance has muscular dystrophy. He uses a wheelchair to get around, but the muscle disease makes it difficult to handle simple activities, like opening up his locker.

The robotics project has taken the better part of the school year to design, build, test, and refine.The initial use of a key fob proved to be too difficult to activate, so now the automated locker door opener is triggered by a wave of Torrance's hand over a sensor. Another wave closes the door.Torrance has a student who helps him carry his books and supplies, but the locker door is now a task he can accomplish on his own.The door opener may soon be available to other special-needs students. Stuhldreher and Smrcka won a $1,500 grant from the Society of American Military Engineers to create more of the devices.

Student Focus Question(s): Who do you feel got the most benefit from this project, Nick - the physically challenged student or his classmates who designed and built the robot locker? Why? What other things do you think students might design to help their classmates in situations like this?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

As part of their informational research and review writing for the Common Core ELA reading, writing, and speaking/listening literacy strands, the student journalists of Mr. Grzelecki’s 660 Writing class reviewed and reflected on 3 videos featured in Classroom Robotics blog. With the support of Dr. Reissman, the Director of the school’s Writing Institute, they first analyzed the prompts supplied for each video before viewing it. They discussed the pros and cons of each very real and engaging issue presented. These involve authentic robotics products, advertisements, and applications in Space Research. Dr. Reissman pointed out to them, as well, that in the related genre of Science Fiction writer’s often include descriptions of technology items (inventions and products) which, while they may be very expensive at the time of the writing, will become affordably within comfortable reach of the general public in a future perhaps that may be only ten to thirty years of the story’s publication. Mr. Grzelecki reminded the students to take notes during the viewing of the videos. After each short video, Dr. Reissman and Mr. Grzelecki had the students revisit in discussion their initial takes on the issues. Finally the student news journalists offered their reactions in writing.

These students participated as members of a community of learners focused on the blog’s contents, viewing electronic and visual text and commenting as real world citizens on ethical, economic, and lifesaving issues raised by robotics technology. That’s kick starting genuine Common Core skills that count in our real challenging world. Below, is a selection of their commentary.

“The killer robot could be exceedingly destructive. It is very cool looking. Still using it could be very bad for our country.”

Bisma N----

“I am not in favor of the killer robot. The robot could kill anyone it is programmed to kill. In addition, the robot could turn against all humankind and kill humans.”

Kamela L----

“I am in favor of robots going to war. It will save many lives. This will allow our population to grow.”

Sherry ----

“My reaction to this product is interesting. This product is better than people for combating war. In a war, you could send a robot, instead of a person. A person can get injured and pass a way. But if a robot is disabled, so what? I think this is a good product.”

“Robot Astronauts are a great idea. Robots can reach planets, humans can’t reach such as Mars. If something goes wrong, there is no loss of human life.”

Svetlana G----

“I am in favor of replacing humans with robots for space exploration. Robots can explore space faster. They can do a better job than humans. It could be dangerous for humans to go into space, but for the robots the dangers do not matter. I personally don’t think it is amazing when humans travel into space, but when robots do it is cool.”

Shamar K----

“I think that the idea of robots going into space is awesome. The use of robots to explore space could help us find out about distant worlds. It costs less money to send robots into space. Using robots can prevent human astronauts from getting hurt or killed. Traveling to space is a dangerous job, let the robots do it.”

Geraldo S----

“My reaction to having robots do the difficult task of space exploration is a positive one. I am impressed and glad about this idea because it will make things easier. For a human creating cars for space is a difficult. The cars a human creates might not be efficient. But for a robot, making these cars might be easier and more efficient. This potential use of robots does not only apply to their crafting a car, but can apply to other manufacturing tasks as well. For robots, jobs like fighting wars and making weapons or even behavior correction are appropriate work.”

Shajid M----

“Yes, I think that robots should manage the difficult tasks that humans can’t do properly. Robots can absolutely replace astronauts, teachers and factory workers. In using them salaries and benefits are saved.”

Dyamond B----

“I think it is a good idea for robots to replace humans in outer space. It’s cheaper because you don’t have to train them as astronauts.”

“I think that the message of respecting the uses and powers of technology was shown in that commercial. But in the real world, I am not in favor of such robots. They might do something crazy.”

Jasmine E----

“I think that minus the female kicking robot, the commercial would be much less effective. Using the female super robot makes men feel inferior, like the man in the commercial.”

Susan G----

“If robots were to take over jobs people do, such as car building and car sales, it would be dangerous. If robots get too violent as the female does in this commercial, how can a human stop them? If like in this commercial, they become very humanoid, they might begin to pretend and feel that they were actually humans.”

Ahmed R----

“A robot like this should not be available for purchase because it could really hurt people. It is too violent."

Shajid M----

“This Kia ad does indeed teach its audience to respect the powers of the Hot Bot robot. Once the man kicks the car as he looks it over, she kicks him into the wall. Got to “respect the tech.”

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Researchers have developed a remote-controlled robot about the size of a fat housefly that mimics a fly’s aerial prowess.

.A developer of the robot, Robert J. Wood, an electrical engineer at Harvard, said it “reproduces some of the key aspects of being able to control flight, stably hover and maneuver.”

The wafer-thin wings of a fly flap 120 times a second. Developing a robot to do the same took more than a decade and a variety of technologies, according to Dr. Wood and his colleagues, who describe it in the current issue of the journal Science.

It weighs just 80 milligrams and is controlled remotely. Each wing can be controlled independently.

To make the muscles, the researchers used piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. The frame is made of carbon fiber embedded with plastic hinges as joints. The researchers also layered and sandwiched sheets of laser-cut materials.

“It takes inspiration from children’s pop-up books,” Dr. Wood said. “You can take the composite and fold it into whatever structure you want.” ..."

Student Focus Question(s): Is the point of the project described in the article simply to create a tiny, flying robot; or are the designers trying to learn something important, too? If so, what are they trying to discover? Do you think there might be a practical use for this robot? What would that be? With the success of this project, what would you recommend they work on next?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Inventor Matt Denton shows off his robotic spider creatio
A giant-mantis robot with hydraulic legs has been unveiled by a designer who spent four years creating it.
Matt Denton, from Hampshire, estimates his "very expensive toy" has cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He says a mining company and a marine research organisation are now interested in his design and he hopes it might be used at science fairs.
During its development the machine had one outing, at a music festival, where Mr Denton says it was well received.
"It's an entertainment vehicle," he said. "But I hope it will inspire people."

The project was only initially intended to take 12 months, Mr Denton, who usually specialises in small-scale animatronics for the film industry, said.
"After 18 months we tried the model out. We had to completely strip out and rebuild the legs. They were too heavy and complicated.
Animatronics expert Matt Denton says his machine's legs are inefficient "I'm a software and electronics engineer so this was out of my area - I had to learn fast."Read the full article at its source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22231365
Student Focus Question(s): What do you think is the real reason that Matt created this machine? Who do you think might be interested in purchasing a machine like this? Why? If you had one, what sorts of improvements on it would you want to add?

After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Researchers have designed a robot that crawls like a sea turtle which could help inspire future multi-terrain robots that would also be able to swim and walk.

The new robot, dubbed “Flipperbot,” was designed to allow scientists to learn more about the locomotion of animals such as seals, sea turtles and mudskippers.

Its creators, from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Northwestern University, wanted a better understanding of how these animals use their flippers and fins to move on surfaces like sand.

Flipperbot, which is 19 centimeters long and weighs 790 grams, crawls by using two flipper-like front limbs that span about 40 centimeters. To power the turtle-like robot, each of its limbs is equipped with small servo motors with thin, lightweight flippers attached to the end.

Flipperbot could also help scientists gain a better understanding of how structures like fins and flippers evolved when fish-like animals moved from the water onto land several hundred million years ago.

Flipperbot makes its way through sand. (Nicole Mazouchova)

To better understand the mechanics of flipper-based movement on land Daniel Goldman from the Georgia Tech team said that his group, before designing Flipperbot, to better understand the mechanics of flipper-based movement on land, researchers studied how hatchling sea turtles propelled themselves from their nests on sandy beaches into the sea.

'Flipperbot allowed us to explore aspects of the sea turtle’s gait and structure that were challenging, if not impossible, to investigate in field experiments using actual animals,' said Goldman..."

Student Focus Question(s): 1) Is the purpose of the Flipperbot project to create a robot sea turtle? - To learn something important that might be used in ways that have nothing to do with sea turtles? - Other? 2) If you could design a robot that moves like a specific animal, which one would you model it on? 3) Try some online research and find out if anyone has ever worked on designing such a robot already... what did you find?After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Commnets" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

We've always thought that when robots would truly arrive, life would get better. Being a fan of Asimov and robots, we've been waiting for a long time. The wait isn't really over, but more and more, artificial intelligence and robots are making their presence felt in our everyday lives. It's true that robots like the ones found in science-fiction will take a long time to be made into reality, but slowly and surely, they will come. We just hope that we don't have to bow down to our robot masters! In this post, we'll present two of the most recent useful robots that we've encountered. They are both linked to webcams, making them really interesting.

Rovio Robot Sentry

No, this isn't out of Aliens, but Rovio is the real deal. He's a remote controlled robot sentry. He will roam around your house and keep robbers out. Rovio was furst announced at the CES 2008 conference and recently went on sale for about $300. It packs a 640 x 480 webcam to stream video live in MPEG4 format. It can also snap stills, head out on customized patrol routes and avoid obstacles thanks to its infrared sensor. The robot itself comes with a charging dock and some room beacons, making it easier for Rovio to get around your place..."

Student Focus Question(s): If robot sentries like the ones described in this article were to become so popular that almost everyone had one at home, how do you think this would change our society? Our way of life? - What more than patrolling your house might you want these robots to do?

After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Commnets" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....
.....................................................................................................Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.
Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Monday, April 29, 2013

Classroom Robotics Blog: Powerful Prompts for Teachers and Paraprofessionals to Use to Fully Engage Special Needs Students

By Barbara Carter Ellis

Students, teachers, parents, and other members of the learning community can celebrate learning about robotics when they open the door to this website. The blog is filled with exciting experiences and observations for 21st Century students, particularly, writing, speaking, and listening prompts which paraprofessionals and teachers can use when working with special needs students, in fact all students who are yearning for authentic, fun, robotic-centered reading, writing, viewing, speaking, listening, and creating.

As a dedicated teacher/educator of paraprofessionals and teachers for NYSUT (New York State United Teachers), I focus on creating as strong collaboration between the classroom teacher, the paraprofessional, and service providers listed on the student I.E.P. (Individual Education Plan).

The Blog's videos, which can be viewed by small groups of students, perhaps with paraprofessional-facilitated, targeted discussion and viewing, are captivating and effective for immediately engaging students in CCSS (Common Core Standards) focused reading, speaking, building knowledge in science, engineering, communications, political and social consequences of robotics technology. Beyond STEM skills, the content can also be shifted to science fiction genre study. An especially important aspect of the use of this blog as a resource and teaching tool for special needs students is that is provides complex visual and verbal content suitable for special needs learners. Further, it provides the wonderful experience for students of being published alongside their peers.

Instructional Suggestions

The following are some suggestions for teachers and paraprofessionals working with Special Education students –as well as for other support team members, such as speech therapists and family members, who can benefit from using this blog resource for family literacy.

Timeline

Complete a dated timeline of the students’ activities and the tools used.

Double Entry Journal

Keep a journal with Double Entry pages which can be used to record student experiences and reflections. Beyond their publishing of their ideas on the blog, this can validate and document their CCSS reading, writing, speaking, listening, and short research efforts in informational content.

The blog helps engage creative ideas of how the students can complete projects using a variety of graphic organizers and thinking tools. Use graphic organizers to have students create their robotic and tell why they feel the invention could make the world a better place. It can help engage student in projects that foster learning-centered dialogue.

Block Scheduling

Use this strategy to allow enough time to plan, create, practice, and review the purpose of the robot project the student is creating.

Brainstorming

Build lists of new ideas based on student inventories for future Robotics projects.

Parents

Develop an ongoing connection with parents, so that homework could include weekend fun and family projects. Again, families can create journals to record their experiences. The results can be added to create a classroom newspaper.

Word Wall

As the students expand their robot-related vocabulary, use word walls to record their definitions.

Picture Walk

Use your vocabulary from the word wall to create stories about your robotic adventures.

Follow the Leader

The art of questioning and response: An excellent connection to each of the blog posts is created by questions listed at the end of each visual experience. Use them! For instance, ask the students: “What do you think the real reason Mr. Kurato created the powerful tools is? Get the brain wheels turning so that students can answer questions for their journals. Connect with the speech clinician to modify or enrich this experience. (Common Core) Help the para professional develop questions to use when talking to the students.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

“Classroom Robotics Blog is the Perfect Informational Text Resource to Support Student Success with Common Core Social Studies and Science Standards”

Dr. Rose Reissman

Prompting Classroom Collaboration, Comprehension, and Text-Based Tasks: One Blog Post at a Time

Brooklyn – April 24, 2013

It was a delight to find Classroom Robotics Blog, a fascinating and compelling resource for educating today’s students. This blog is rich in content, from the social issues associated with today’s science and technology to news about advances in robotics. It has much to offer kids and the adults who work with them.

As a literacy expert who is teaching Title 1 middle school students in New York City, and who does CCSS (Common Core State Standards) alignments for schools and cultural organizations, I was especially impressed by the captivating student prompts that the blog provides with the stories and videos it runs.

Now that 46 states have embraced the Common Core ELA, Social Studies, and Science literacy strand, which stresses a balance of literature and informational content in reading, as well as requiring students to do short research projects, this blog’s informational text summaries, which are gleaned from authentic science and technology online research sources, offer student readers highly accessible informational text content. These articles, along with the engaging robot themed videos, can engage a broad spectrum of students, including ESL and Special Needs, as well as and Gifted and Talented learners, in analyzing cutting edge technology advances and their impact. In view of the Common Core requirements, and beyond, this is a great way to bridge from informational science fact to science fiction and back again.

The rich combination of You Tube videos, plus summaries of complex informational texts and prompts that the blog provides can be answered by students as evidence grounded arguments with claims supported by texts. This nicely authenticates multi-content Common Core (Social Studies and Science) standards in Writing.

As a teacher of middle school English Language Arts, working with a range of ESL, Newcomer, Special Needs, Gifted, and On Grade Level students , I was, just today, able to use the this blog’s content to scaffold questioning and engage students in a speaking and listening, collaborative discussion about the efficacy of a hair washing robot. The range of student responses using the prompts provided by the blog about advantages and potential problems of this example of robotics technology, allowed for a sustained classroom conversation. The resulting initial student responses allowed me to suggest additional research from literary and informational resources to provide evidence for or against the students' initial opinions/points of view.

In terms of language standards, by the nature of the texts that are summed up on the blog, the students are not only introduced to a sizable compendium of academic vocabulary they can use in other writing and speaking contexts; but also to science, technology, and mathematics/engineering vocabulary that is nuanced and special domain specific. This growing use of STEM words supports student ownership of these words in their blog responses, plus enhances their STEM informational and academic vocabulary.
What a joyous, robot-driven, high interest resource this blog is!! I highly recommend colleagues make use of it. It is a complex and captivating STEM rich experience for all CCSS literacy strand teachers and everyone fascinated by robots. The student reactions to it will be unique and inspiring!

Bravo!!

Dr. Rose Reissman

Dr. Rose Reissman is the founder and director of the Writing Institute Program at Ditmas IS 62 Brooklyn. This program has been replicated in 118 schools throughout the US. She is an English Language Arts educator whose projects with students include books, podcasts, school-based museums, and scripts as well as student leadership efforts. She is the author of many books and articles.

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!